jandy

Interesting timing. I was playing with Etcd just this morning. I'm glad there's some more options in this space. I haven't been happy with any setup so far.

Doozer (https://github.com/ha/doozerd) got me excited. It's small, fast, and written in Go. Unfortunately, its development seems quiet and fragmented. Its lack of TTL-style values made it a pain to do a distributed lock service without having a sweeper for cleaning up dead locks.

Zookeeper (http://zookeeper.apache.org) is much more fully featured and mature, but felt way too heavy compared to my nimble Go stack. Installing and maintaining a JVM just for Zookeeper made me uncomfortable.

Etcd is interesting. It has TTLs, it's small and fast, easy to pick up/learn, and it's in active development (and it's tied with CoreOS and Docker, so it's bound to get some reflected love).

Thank you, that was a much clearer explanation of what was happening. Also explains why I'd occasionally see a black circle drift over one of the colored ones.

That's pretty cool, but "self healing" is a bit misleading.

It's not very self healing when it requires somebody to drive along with a vehicle that would heat up the road to fix it. That's like saying all current roads are self-healing because they just require someone to drive along and fill in the holes.

Still cool though, easier to repair roads are always good.

That was an interesting comparison.

As others have said, no sound on the HTML5 version.

There were some minor differences between the two that I found interesting. The HTML5 scrolling would occasionally stutter; however, the Flash version suffered from some slight alignment issues in the tiles.

Overall I was very impressed by the HTML5 version, the two were almost impossible to tell apart. I doubt (apart from the obvious audio issue) I would've known which was which if I hadn't been told beforehand.

Dicks, dicks everywhere.

Fun idea, but yeah, any collaborative drawing platform has this issue.

Lets not conflate this with the M logo, which wasn't my point (I don't think either of us would expect the Tumblr logo to take you anywhere other than Tumblr).

The point, correct me if I'm wrong, of your post was that a company's logo on their Tumblr blog should go to their own website and not to the root of their Tumblr blog. Yet, because your blog is on Medium it's ok that none of the titles go to your homepage?

I want to find out more about you. I click on your picture, it takes me to a profile on Medium, which links to your about.me profile and your twitter profile (and mentions a twitter handle for Scoutize). I then have to click through those to find actual links to your personal blog and Scoutize. Why are you ok with this interaction but it's not cool for a company to do it with Tumblr?

This implies that the reader should understand the behaviour of whatever particular blogging engine/platform the author is using.

How is understanding that clicking on a face in medium does one thing any different than understanding that clicking on the header in a tumblr does something else?

I just did it and got this in my logs:

184.73.36.14/ec2-184-73-36-14.compute-1.amazonaws.com - - [02/Feb/2013:06:12:19 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 11310 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.19.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.3 Safari/5 Powered by Spider-Pig by tinfoilsecurity.com"

They're definitely hitting the URLs, I just think they have a backlog.

I've been suspecting the same thing. Two of my accounts received the email, both created several years ago, while none of my newer accounts have been compromised.

I noticed that and wondered the same thing.

If somebody had broken the lock on his mailbox and read his letters instead of his email, would that have been considered terrorism?

The word has become meaningless, but they can get away with using it when it's paired with something people don't understand (They HACKED my email!). Hopefully once these things become more understood, more people will realise how silly it is deeming this as terrorism.

I love these kind of limited interaction situations, and what behaviour you see coming out of it. I moved around for a minute in a slow deliberate path, and others started following me; then I stopped completely still, and others lined their flags up next to mine in a square. Amusing, and all with no communication.

Could somebody explain the "HTML5 game engine for mobile, desktop and beyond" part? Is it because it's HTML5, and will therefore work wherever a HTML5 supporting browser will work, or is there something more to make it "desktop" friendly?

I don't, and it bugs the hell out of me when I'm sat reading with someone else who does. Nothing more distracting than them going nuts with the mouse while I'm trying to read.

I get why people do it, but sheesh, take your hands off the mouse for a minute, it won't kill you!

To elaborate on the semi-structured input point: Monogo and it's kin are great for EAV systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%...), where your entities can have an arbitrary number of fields (often user defined). Trying to build this kind of system in a traditional RDBMs can be quite tricky.

Works fine here on Chrome for Mac.

Static assets are taking a very long time to load for me.

I noticed, for example, that the Select a Color image under Learn More is 1024x786 and weighing in at 590kb despite only being displayed at a size of 282x212. I'd recommend you do something about that.

This has been the practice in Ruby for quite a long time (albeit without Go). Usually high load/slow areas are rewritten as a C module.

So yeah, sound advice but nothing revolutionary. Go looks nice though.

Same here. I found it distracting and tiring, and just not very funny.

Yep, a decent amount.

I haven't used it since the big push towards Scala though. So whatever I say is based on the Java versions.

If your constraint is Java, then Play is a great way to get away from a lot of the cruft and overhead of that stack; however, you'll very quickly realise it's not all roses. The Java leaks through in a lot of places, and it's now quite far behind the stack it's mimicking (ie it feels more like Rails 1.2 - 2.0 rather than 3+).

For me, if I have the ability to not choose Java and I wanted that kind of stack, I'd just go to the horses mouth and pick Rails. If I had to use Java, Play is a pretty nice place to be.

Took a month off in March to relax and do some traveling. Two weeks in and I can't take any more doing nothing, this popped out: http://www.getonthegame.com.au

It's a price comparison website for Australian video games. Still early days yet, but it's been a fun distraction and an opportunity to learn some new tech/tools in the process.

Wow, your story is very familiar to me (without the successful startup, sadly!). I'm British too, and simply found all the options available to someone interested in the web severely lacking. I'd done a couple of years of building websites for small businesses and such, and I was pretty much ahead of everyone I could find (admittedly I was from a fairly sleepy area).

I ended up joining a course but dropped out after less than a month; the first sign that it wasn't going to work out was at the initial interview where someone said "You've done some web work I see? I bet you'll be able to teach me a thing or two!" that person was the head lecturer.

Algorithms, advanced maths, and cryptography are also the areas I feel I lack.

All in all, I don't think I've suffered in the slightest either. Finding the first job was probably a bit tricker, but in hindsight I've had an additional 3/4 years earning good wages than those people who did do the degrees. I'm not strongly opinionated as to whether they're worthwhile or not, but I don't believe I've been negatively impacted by it.

I have thought a few times that the traditional style of education simply isn't applicable to some people; I was never very good at school, but flourished once I learnt how to teach myself what I wanted to learn.

An "abomination", really?

I use Git regularly--and happily--on Windows with very few issues. It is considerably slower than its Mac/Linux builds, but aside from that the experience has been positive.

What exactly do you consider to be Git's failings on Windows? And how is Mercurial superior in those respects?

I'm currently teaching a complete beginner how to program. She's interested in the web, but I was concerned about the breadth of RoR; instead we've gone with Sinatra, which seems to be much easier to swallow. It's much closer to the metal, and has considerably less moving parts than RoR.

It's working out pretty well so far.

I remember doing this as a teenager when we all started getting mobile phones (England). At first it was just to annoy people, we'd call it "pranking", where you'd call someone and hang-up before they answered; but later it evolved into a "I have no credit, please call me back" signal.

The phenomenon seemed to die off pretty much exactly at the same time as when everyone got jobs and/or money.

Wait, wasn't one of the main benefits of cloud hosting that we don't have to manage it ourselves? Isn't this just hosting your own server?

Am I crazy thinking it'd be a good idea to have an elevator which analyses its own usage patterns and adjusts its behaviour accordingly?

These are some good optimisation tips.

I'm a little torn with some of them though; they're optimisations, and I don't think you should necessarily do them all by default.

Specifically, I'm thinking of the selector optimisation.

    $('#id').find('p')

may be faster than

    $('#id p')

but to me, the latter is more idiomatic jQuery. Why that matters, in my opinion, is the latter is much more likely to be optimised by the jQuery because it's the default way most people write selectors.

There's nothing wrong with optimisations, and developers should certainly know what's happening behind the scenes, but what's true today might not be true in 6 months time.

I think I made a point in there somewhere.

Not necessarily; and this is what I meant by vague (though yes, complicated is probably a better term).

http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/gambling_sectors/remote...

  Do I need a licence if I am based abroad?
  
  You do not need a licence from us to run a remote gambling service if all of your
  remote gambling equipment is located outside Great Britain.
  
  If you are based abroad and want to advertise your gambling services in Great
  Britain, you must be based in a whitelisted country or a country mentioned
  in the Gambling Act 2005.

What qualifies as our "gambling equipment"? Our webservers?

That being said, it's still probably a good idea to get a license.

Pay more money than I'm probably willing right now... :)

Seriously though, our competitors seem to do it themselves. Which probably means PCI compliance and a merchant account, then doing all the integration themselves.